Dreams

I had some really memorable dreams this week, on the 30th and the 31st! Both of them were dreams that will likely be rated an 8/10 and above, with the one on the 31st being a 9/10, largely on the strength of making friends and losing them again, and visiting amazing dream locations, as well as being vivid memories in general. And putting them together with my other dreams from the last two weeks means that I’ve had a succession of good dreams that have been worthy of Highlight Awards lately, and together they have made me look forward to sleeping each night, just to see what else my built-in mental AI can come up with.

Mar 29 2023

• Snippet: There was a scene involving me travelling from Edmonton and out into the prairie area around the city. It was an overnight trip in a car or taxi, with the feeling that there was some sort of deadline or time limit in the morning when I would meet Mom and my siblings again. There were large landmarks in the background as the vehicle travelled on.
• As part of the dream journey, I was given a software package worth $4.99 with lots of little applications for free, about 20 or 30 of them in all. I installed them all except one of them which was 150 gb in size. There were also other apps that I needed to buy separately.
• Snippet: Later on, there was a woman who was both a teacher and a fortune teller, and she was on stage with the members of the band Take That, on a show that was highlighting them and how successful they were as a mega-group of boy idols back in the late 90s and where the individual members were now. They all watched a music video of the group performing some song, then they had the teacher return the five men in the group a grade-school level grammar homework assignment from page 21 of some textbook. Two of them had gotten an average mark, two of them did a little better than that, and one guy did the best out of the lot, nearly getting a perfect score. However, it turned out that he had actually made a mistake on one of the questions that was worth most of the marks, leaving out a pronoun that was supposed to be there, but the teacher gave him full marks for that question because she had also made the same mistake on her sheet. The two members tied for the lowest score had actually both gotten that question right but were marked down for it.

Mar 30 2023

• I travelled to Japan in advance of my study abroad trip in the Fall. While there, I first had a weird sideplot after I arrived at the campus that involved a bunch of difficult games going on in different buildings. The one I saw was a prison warden simulation where the warden was really brutal to his prisoners, killing some of them, and skimming funds off the top of the budget, and the prisoners were in the middle of a prison riot that usually ended with his death. I could apparently join as the warden to try to survive, or as an investigator who could follow a smell and some rumours and find some prisoner bodies behind a dumpster behind the prison.
• The game/simulation itself had about five parallel tunnels leading out from the cell area on the right toward the front lobby and exit on the left, and one circular character sprite representing a guard standing at the left end of each one. Prisoners were on the right side and pushing left, and it was all the guards could do to defend their spots. The prisoner character sprites were red from anger, while the guard character sprites were red from blood. There was also a group of 5-8 icons travelling together, that was the warden’s group, and it could defeat and suppress the prisoners it ran into, but it also had a hit point bar that was steadily dropping, and whenever it reached zero the warden himself would die. There were far more prisoners than he could handle and he, as part of the computer AI, never stopped to heal between fights, which was why he always lost.
• Later on, I visited a school shop on the campus, which was set on the ground floor of a building and had a ceiling but no walls on three sides. The only wall was on the side with the cashier. The proprietress had left the shop for a little while though, so I just looked around a bit. Most of the shop had snacks and such, but one section was devoted to shelves of books, and I noted with surprise that they were largely English books, mostly romance novels. I did see one section with five or so Fighting Fantasy gamebooks on the top corner of a shelf, and was surprised at that too as I didn’t own any of them. One of the books even seemed to be a double-sized book, and was titled something like Orgrimmar: Singapore. Opposite from the bookshelf was a desk staffed by two guys, which had brochures and other things on it. They were recruiting volunteers for the army.
• After that, I visited the school library, which was a huge, single-floor room with warm, incandescent lighting. The walls were lined with desks and computers and I knew that two of the computers had Epson 346 scanners that I could use while here, so I was casually looking for them, though I never did find them. That was fine though, and I chatted with someone else over Discord who was also visiting Japan and was using his own scanner to scan CDs.
• I also came across about 200 plastic chairs or so arranged in rows and columns in the middle of a wide open space in the library, each chair about 1.5 meters away from its nearest neighbours, and all facing the same direction. Apparently this was a very popular use of the space, and plenty of Japanese people were seated in the chairs, quietly reading books. Sometimes someone would accidentally make some sort of noise, and several people would hiss a “Shhh” at them. I did sit down with a book behind a girl and proceeded to read it for a minute or two, but what I actually wanted to do was take a picture of this and put it on my blog.
• I had chipped the fingernail on my left hand and it was annoying me, so I eventually took my leave and got onto a train that left the area. Before leaving though, I passed a weird scene where an elder sister shut a younger brother into a manhole in the ground and kept him there by sitting on top of the manhole cover, while the younger brother cried within the darkness.
• The train took me on a route that reminded me of the large expanse of space between the Yio Chu Kang (N10) and Khatib (N11) stations in Singapore, and I could see Sophia out the train window over a lake where the reservoir usually would be on the right side of the train. I pulled out my phone here, set it horizontal against the glass window portion of the train door, and took a picture of this, before realizing that the phone camera’s flash was set to On instead of Off and being thankful that I hadn’t tried to take a picture in the library. I turned it to Off and took another photo.
• Later on, in a separate but related dream after waking up and falling asleep again, it was apparently the last day before some sort of school graduation, and I helped an old woman find the train station to leave the school campus area that I was on. It was an underground station two storeys down in the building that we were standing next to when we met, and we were going to the elevator down to it, but the elevator shaft doors were made of glass and so I could see a bunch of people standing across the elevator door from us that obviously just came from the train area.
• I surmised that we would be able to reach it faster once the elevator arrived by entering the elevator doors on our side, and then leaving the elevator by the doors on the opposide side before the doors closed. I told the old woman that and she said she wasn’t sure that she would be able to cross it in time with the crowd there, but I helped her do so successfully against the crowd moving in the opposite direction, once the elevator arrived and the doors on both sides opened. As expected, there were then stairs or escalators right there that led right down to the train platform.
• Later that evening, I was at home and Wela, who was apparently in my main Discord server, chatted and said thanks for having her and Jessica (a mutual friend from McNally) there over the past year or so, as she appreciated the chance to catch up with us and the glimpses into other people’s lives. I said they were welcome to stay and chat with us afterwards as well, but she said that the both of them would be moving on and going their own separate ways after graduation. They also thanked each other for making food over the time they stayed together in the campus dorms, and thanked me for helping out with dishes and chores too. I woke up after this feeling a bit sad.

Mar 31 2023

Dream 1

• I was living on the 4th floor of a large dorm building with some friends from what I believe was the GEP, since I remember Allen being there at least. There were other strangers mixed in too though, and the floor was half-empty, specifically we were all in rooms on the southern end of the building and the rooms on the northern side, accessible via a corridor that formed a looping square, were largely empty. All our apartments were individually fairly big, slightly larger than even my Edmonton 205 apartment, and looked like they could easily hold about 4 people each.
• Anyway, one day, people on the first three floors were chased up by maintenance staff who were renovating the entire building except for our floor. They were going to be doing this for about a week, and had told all the students to go up and use the facilities and empty rooms on the 4th floor for the time being. But there were still a lot more students than empty rooms.
• The scene started from me returning from some lower level bath facility with a towel draped over my head and neck, climbing the wrong staircase due to the confusion of there being so many people around, and ending up on the north side of the corridor loop near the empty rooms. Except they were no longer empty, as people were wandering in and out of them. There were benches along the sides of the corridor that people were sitting on, and Allen was in a glass-enclosed communal billiards room on that north side, looking really happy as he played a game on it with someone, since there were usually not enough people and so we never really came all the way north to visit that room.
• I continued eastwards to where the passage turned south, then followed that too toward the start of the cluster of rooms that were already occupied before the influx of the cleaning refugees. Along the way, I passed more benches with people on them, and someone asked if I knew if we had a VCR player somewhere. I said we did, and pointed them to two wide and flat machines seated on a cabinet a bit further down the hallway — a CD player seated on top of a VCR player.
• When I reached my room, I found the door open and two people in it, one boy and one girl, both University-age young adults. I had left the room door unlocked but closed and Chinese music playing from some speakers when I went down to the baths, and they had both entered in the interim, and put their bags on separate wooden chairs while waiting for me. They were both Chinese as well, so due to the contents of the music, they started speaking to me in Chinese, but after exchanging a few words we all found that we were more comfortable in English, so we swapped over to that.
• They were basically a bit hesitant but obviously wanted to ask if they could stay here, so I offered for them to use this place as a temporary staging point, they could leave their stuff here and stay/rest here overnight as well. As long as they didn’t mind my noisy neighbours. I told them that I never locked the door during the day unless I went out of the building, and I told them I trusted them because they already had plenty of time to steal my stuff if they had wanted to.
• The boy eventually started playing a game on a small, square wooden billards or carrom type table that I had — he put down some marbles and tried to shoot them into the holes on the side of the table. Unfortunately, the table was incomplete and still being built. In particular, the rims were not done, and I had built one and a half sides that were joined together but had not completed all four sides yet and certainly had not attached them to the table. He still used it to block the side of the table that he was shooting toward, so that he could bounce off that side and try to land the marble in the corner hole, but after the ricochet his marble flew out my front door, and into and down the stairwell that I usually used to climb up to this level.
• The marble ended up down on the second level of the building, and I told him to please go retrieve it. He did so, leaving the room and picking up the marble with his mouth before coming back up. I moved the half-constructed side piece back around so it was blocking the side of the board that was facing the door.
• Fast forward a few days, and I had become fairly good friends with my two guests, though they were still a bit shy. But it was time for them to return to their rooms the next day. I made them a dinner with fluffy white rice, soup with potatoes and carrots, and some meat with gravy for their last evening here.

Dream 2

• This dream included some elements and locations that I’m sure I had seen once before, though it isn’t a dream that has been written down in the journal. It started off in an extracurricular art club in school, where all the 30 or so people who chose this club or class went to sit at tables of 4 or 5 and created things according to previous themes. In my previous incarnation of this dream, I joined the table at the back right, meeting three other people I did not know, and generally having a good time with this. In this incarnation, however, several girls that I knew had joined me in this club or class out of loyalty and friendship. I remember Gillian, Yiwen, and Valerie, but I don’t remember who the others were or if they were all from Dunman as well.
• There were six of us however, whereas the tables only fit 4, but that didn’t stop us, as one of them dragged out a table and put it in the center back of the room, and placed six chairs around it. We all settled down in them. As the only one with experience in this class, I mentioned that the table was too small for us though, since it was only the size of one of our chairs too, and doubly so since half the table was bent upwards at an angle — we needed completely flat table space for our assignments.
• I suggested moving two school desks in and joining them together, and the others agreed. Someone lifted up the small table and removed it, while I carried in the first school desk and placed it down. I noticed that the rubber leg holders of the previous table were not cleared properly and were floating in midair even though the table was itself long removed, so I cleaned that up as well. The second table then soon followed and we sat down as our group of 6. The teacher didn’t seem to mind.
• I had a premonition about the start of the club or class on the 3rd week of school, where our teacher would announce that our team, which we had apparently called Team Blossom or Team Snowflake or something really similar, had won the group contest that we had spent the 2nd week of class doing, beating out all the other groups in class. Apparently some of the girls in my group were really good at arts and crafts, and I was happy about this.
• For the moment though, the rest of the group was still trying to decide on our actual team name, and even though I knew what it was going to be from my premonition, I didn’t add any suggestions and let them organically settle on what it was going to become. I wondered if we had a group project this week and whether we would find out if we won it at the start of the 2nd week’s meeting or not.
• There were also some scenes from a larger plot in school. We were students, but had some mild superhero powers to help defend the school with against a group of villains that occasionally attacked us. Because this was a rehash, I knew the gist of the plot — they had announced that they were going to pull the fire alarm at 2:30 pm, and I knew that in the confusion, and because we would all be spread out around the school during that time, they would kidnap someone (I believe it was Justin from Dunman) and hold him hostage for a bit. I also knew that he would be okay in the end though and that we needed this scene to play through for the plot to progress, possibly because he would come back with some vital information or something, so I didn’t reveal any of that.
• Sometime during the day, after art class but before this happened, I was walking along an elevated outdoor path along with Satinel and two others. We passed by a building about 20 meters away, whose entrance was down below the elevated path, two storeys below us, but the building itself was 8-10 storeys high and towered above us. I pointed that building out to Satinel, and said that that was an arcade. Or rather, it contained a singular, really complex arcade machine that itself was 8 stories high and contained a lot of weird minigames. I had played it before, though I had not completed it. I asked if she was interested in giving it a try and she said yes, so the four of us went over there.
• There were two older women at office desks situated right inside the entrance of the building, and then just past that was a small room with two or three TV monitors, a wired handheld controller plugged in to the wall, and I think a steering wheel controller. Off to the side was a mop leaning against a wall, and a doorway leading to a small dead-end room with walls that were tiled like a bathroom but without any actual bathroom facilities in it. There was also another doorway by some stairs that led up to higher levels of the arcade machine, which we would have to access later on to reach different controllers and physical minigames attached to this enormous game machine.
• I pointed out that the floor of that side room was covered in a thin layer of water, and some of it was flowing out the doorway, and sloshed the water back in with the mop. I said that this was actually part of the early part of the game’s setup, and that the mop would be able to consume the water once the game started. I told Satinel that I would help out with it since the game was essentially multiplayer. One of the two seated women also encouraged us to start the game, especially if the room was leaking again.
• Satinel turned on the game and the first thing that popped up were a couple other saved games with scores, from other players, but I noticed that my game was no longer there. That was no surprise, since I had last came here and played this over a year ago. The names of the current games were all cool or ice themed. I told Satinel that there were several secrets in the game as well, that would unlock skill overcaps and special attacks and more, and that we would have to figure them out and collect them as we went along. I knew two of them to start off. But before we even got that far, Satinel took the controller and pressed the buttons corresponding to the Konami code, and that apparently also unlocked a new secret.
• The game itself was essentially a spaceship sidescroller game, and we not only flew through space but also had to maintain the ship as we went along, thus the enormous building representing the ship. At one point, we had to pause playing the game because there was a commotion going on outside. Outside the arcade building was a short path leading away from the elevated path and toward a kitchen, and some men, who apparently were my uncles or relatives on Dad‘s side, were making a fuss as they were trying to catch a small mouse that was running around in the kitchen. One of them finally forced a standoff with the mouse, staring at the mouse as the mouse stared back, and another one of them used the opportunity to line up some sort of head vice tool over the mouse’s head and tighten it, trapping the mouse and allowing it to be picked up by the tool’s handle. The mouse had an angry look on its face and smoke was billowing out from between its teeth, so it certainly looked dangerous even though it was small. The uncle who picked up the mouse didn’t seem fazed at all though and paraded it around a bit.
• After the mouse was disposed of, there was some cleaning that had to be done along the path from the kitchen to just outside the arcade building. I noticed that a short, fat man, possibly a teacher or principal, was going to scrub the area, and I offered to do it instead. He commended me as he gave me the brushes, but the real reason I was helping him was because there were two lawnmower-like machines parked just outside the arcade that also had clumps of dirt on it, but were used for some later minigame as well, and needed to be cleaned anyway. I didn’t want him to remove the machines until they were cleaned up or something as we wouldn’t be able to play the game otherwise. I cleaned them in front of him and he commented on what a great job I did.
• The scene rolled on, and later on I found myself in some room with some older women, probably teachers of some kind, when the alarms started going off. I looked at the clock and realized that it was 2:30 and that while I knew that the villain group had started this alarm, it wasn’t widely known to the school community, who just assumed that this was a regular fire drill. I was with Angela from McNally, and I asked her to follow me as I went outside and then proceeded to try to gather and meet up with as many of my friends (who all had some kind of vague, unnamed superpower) as possible so that we could all be together and ready to defend if anything happened. I knew it was likely that Justin was already kidnapped, or in the process of doing so, but I wanted to make sure no one else got in trouble.
• I was broadcasting my location to my friends, so most of them found me pretty quickly, once a good bunch of the people had arrived, I led the class along a path, past students that were sitting around loitering on benches, and lined up to try to get up and through a winding tunnel into an open-air circular arena area above us. I knew that it was somehow plot-important that we got up there as well, at least according to the last time I went through this dream. Some of the students in front of us left so we could move up faster, whereas others just stood around chatting to each other, we passed a group of students all wearing the same red Arsenal soccer jersey for some reason along the way up.

Apr 01 2023

• Snippet: I remember at one point being with an acquaintance and shooting one of two monsters from a very long range with a short bow, trying to draw its aggro so that it would come toward us where we could fight it. I was a good shot, but the arrows would run out of velocity before they reached the monster, and clatter lightly against either the monster’s hard hide or against the terrain next to it by the time it reached the monster. There was a jutting out piece of metal that looked like part of a balcony, about neck-height behind the monsters, and I managed to get one or two arrows to somehow land on that metal as well, despite the fact that it was very narrow and the arrows had to end up perpendicular from the direction I was shooting it from to land on it. Anyway I eventually exchanged my short bow for a long bow and only then finally managed to do the deed with the extra punch from the bow.
• Snippet: At another point, I remember going to a library and buying some kind of buffs, but I don’t remember the context behind this, who the buffs applied to, or what I needed them for.

Apr 02 2023

• Snippet: I remember sailing along the Singapore river on a ship that I sailed by myself, and stopping by a certain point next to another ship that was docked on the shoreline. The other captain and I both got off our boats, and we cooperated to defeat something or other that was in the area, before we both then went back to our boats. I waved to him as we prepared to depart, and then also did some sort of emote at his boat, at which point I discovered that emoting to boats was bugged, as the message printed in chat indicated that the boat did the emote instead of me doing the emote at the boat. I tested this again to confirm it, shrugged, and then got back on to my boat.
• He sailed off north and east along the river, while I went back west. Not far from where we had reembarked onto our boats, I glanced south onto the shore again and saw a large dandelion flower with colourful wisps of light trailing up from it. I realized that that was a rare dragon crystal or something, and I immediately bumped my boat onto the shore, jumped off the boat, and dashed over to it just in case someone else was near. No one else was though. I picked up the flower and the rare crystal, as well as another flower that could be used as a dye component that was planted nearby. I then returned to my boat and set off again.
• Snippet: At some point earlier on during that dream, there was something about being overseas and picking the fifth option or version when needing to select a power or person or something from a lineup of five of them. This was somehow important but I don’t remember the context.